Chicago’s mayoral race is heading to a runoff election after incumbent Rahm Emanuel failed to win 50 percent of the vote. Emanuel raised roughly $16 million, more than four times his challengers combined. Could the second-place challenger, Jesús "Chuy" García, a county commissioner and former immigrant rights activist born in Mexico, defeat the man nicknamed "Mayor 1 Percent"? We are joined by Salim Muwakkil, senior...

Students and activists are taking direct action over what some have called the nation’s next financial crisis: the more than $1.2 trillion in student loan debt. The massive cost of U.S. college tuition has saddled millions with crushing debt and priced many others out of the classroom. Now, 15 former students of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges system have launched what they say is the nation’s first student debt strike. The...

Today is National Adjunct Walkout Day. Adjunct professors on campuses across the country hope to draw attention to what many say are poverty-level wages, with no chance to advance to a tenured track position. We are joined by Louisa Edgerly, an adjunct instructor at Seattle University, where she will join other adjuncts and students — along with tenure-track professors — in walking out at noon today.

As a jury in Tennessee has convicted two former Vanderbilt University football players of raping an unconscious student in a dorm room, we look at a groundbreaking new documentary about sexual assault on college campuses across the country. Brandon Vandenburg and Cory Batey could face decades in prison after being convicted of a combined total of 16 felony counts, including aggravated rape. Two other former Vanderbilt football players, Brandon...

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his exclusive year-end interview with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. "The list of his accomplishments in just one year has shocked even me — a total skeptic after more 35 years of covering urban politics in this country," writes González in his latest column. "And it’s not just the big issues like education, affordable housing, reform of police-community relations,...

By Amy Goodman with Denis MoynihanHigh-school students in Jefferson County, Colorado, have been walking out of class en masse this past week, protesting the planned censorship of the district’s Advanced Placement (AP) United States history curriculum by the local school board.

After a county school board in Colorado proposed to rewrite the district’s high school U.S. history curriculum to stop teaching about civil disobedience, students and teachers have responded with acts of civil disobedience of their own. Classes have been canceled twice in Jefferson County as teachers stage mass sick-outs and students walk out of classes. At a protest last week, hundreds of Denver-area high school students held cardboard...

A Columbia University senior who says she was raped on campus by a fellow student has launched an unusual act of protest. Emma Sulkowicz has vowed to carry a dorm room mattress with her everywhere on campus until her rapist is expelled or leaves campus on his own. Sulkowicz says she was raped in her own dorm room in August 2012. That was only the beginning. After she reported her assault to Columbia, she appeared before a disciplinary panel,...

Hundreds of students turned out for a rally at Columbia University in New York City on Friday bearing mattresses and chanting "carry that weight," a reference to the emotional burden they say all survivors must shoulder each day. Some wore red tape over their mouths to symbolize the harms done by Columbia’s bureaucratic handling of sexual assault. Earlier this month, Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz announced she would...